The Color Version of the Law of Attraction
August 27, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 2 Comments
Today, we’re doing things a bit back to front and visiting my other website, A Greener Tea.
I did a very fun talk for our local Red Hat Society. From the speaker’s perspective, this is a uniquely beautiful experience. Everyone wears a red hat, often marvelously decorated with liberal use of a glue gun, and purple clothes. It’s brilliant to behold.
Some look out at the world and see the hand of God. I see color. It connects me to everything else somehow. In the article linked here, called “Personal Color Analysis and the Law Of Attraction”, it strikes me that in knowing and fully accepting ourselves, we find the peace and beauty we all carry inside. LoA and PCA are both about knowing that so-elusive truth about ourselves. Until we see how we sabotage our own happiness, calm, and success, and we all do it oh, so well, we can only attain a very weak version of each of those.
Clear and Muted Orange in Eyes
August 23, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments
I am very excited about this post because eyes are so magically beautiful. If Personal Color Analysis is a window into our truest self, then eyes are the lenses through which those colors are projected back out into our world as our feelings, memories, and histories.
On our Facebook page, I once called a dark green-brown eye ‘swampwater green’. The eye color is particular to some people in the Bright Spring and Winter Seasons. One day, I will find you that eye color, but today is not the day. (The article How Springs Intensify Eye Color gives a link near the end to Heather at coloruza.com; her eye is as close a photo as I’ve found.)
It’s this particularly confusing concept of eye clarity where people get hung up. In 12 Season, or 12-Tone Color Analysis (I’m working at changing my terminology), these ‘clear eyes’ are often found among members of the clear (high saturation) Tones, namely Winter and Spring, and their 2 blends of Bright Winter and Bright Spring.
The fascination with these Tones is because of their rarity, and that very arresting quality of clearness. We recognize that it’s different, but it’s hard to describe verbally.
Here is a man’s eye. You’ll meet him in another article. For now, notice the color of the eye. Look at the quality of the orange tones.
Now, look at this woman’s eye. She is a Soft Autumn.
And now these 2 items.
Can you see which item matches the orange in which eye?
I once said that Spring’s eye makeup browns are not orange-y, which is true, because orange-browns tend to look earthy, the bane and blight of a Spring’s color existence. However, Springs certainly can wear many oranges in clothes and respect their tropical palette quite gorgeously. So too can there be orange in a Spring eye, but it’s not the same orange as Autumn’s.
Autumn’s is a dull rust, right? It’s the opaque, heavy-feeling, quiet, solid brick. Even in a faraway Autumn blend like Dark Winter, the orange has this same thicker, denser quality.
The orange in a Bright Spring or Bright Winter (or True Winter or Spring) eye is the beer bottle. Clear Tones (Seasons) have clear colors. They are reflective of light, not absorbing, as the Autumn seems to be, and more fragile looking perhaps.
The orange (because brown is just dark orange) of a True Winter eye is usually not as clear as that in a Bright Winter eye. That’s because the Bright Winter palette is even more highly saturated (i.e. clear) than True Winter’s. Is is so in every single case? No, there are always exceptions and degrees.
A reader sent me this most amazing eye photo.
Medium-dark brown hair, reddish in the sun. Lashes are light. The orange is beer-bottle clear, right? Notice too the yellowness of the skin tone (quite possible that it’s just from the lighting) and the generous heaping of sunshine yellow in the rest of the eye color (unlikely to be as influenced by lighting, though transparency might be). Without drapes, this could be a True Autumn for all I know, but I sure get a Spring feeling.
Eye effects are much easier to see in a light colored eye. Green can be more complicated. Brown is downright difficult.
Can you draw conclusions about Season from eyes? No. Many saw the man above as Dark Autumn before the drapes. In shade, the clarity of that orange was all but lost and it seemed more hazy.
I try so hard not to look at eye color during a PCA, because the drapes don’t always confirm those leading assumptions that objective color analysts should never make. ANY of the 12 Tones can have ANY hair and ANY eye color. That’s Rule No. 1.
When Your Season Doesn’t Feel Right
August 19, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 28 Comments
Anna (name changed) has just been told that she’s a Soft Summer. She expected Soft Autumn. She is 30 years old.
Anna heads home, reads the document that explains the color analyzed clothes/cosmetic/hair/jewelry that harmonize most beautifully with her natural coloring, looks at her clothes, and sees that nothing is as flattering as it could be. Just like everyone else after a PCA. She looks at the pictures of what her hair color should be and starts buying the new makeup.
None of it feels right. She can’t see the greyed brown undertone in her palette. Her mother always said she was a redhead. Her husband calls her his Coppertone girl and I suggested that Soft Summer isn’t flattered by traditional bronzers. Suddenly it’s all wrong. In her own words, she feels “like a bird that’s fallen out of its nest”. She knows she’s making it be hard when it’s supposed to make her life easier, but how to relax into it?
Confirm the result
I can be wrong. Anyone can be wrong anytime, doing anything. I usually, but not always, go with my first impression. A new set of eyes, a new day, and I might see something else.
We went ahead and did the drapes again.
For a second draping, I always have someone sit in who is not a colour expert but is sensitive to the optical effects. Everyone can tell when you look better, but not everyone is visually perceptive enough to watch a face blur and focus, or the eyes and teeth yellow and whiten. I try not to talk much because I usually see what I saw the first time. Soft Summer was confirmed.
The tangle is mostly between the 2 best Seasons. Nobody can see their own face that objectively, including me, which is why a makeup purchase decision is so often wrong if you test it on your face. Anna’s confusion was valid, in that she felt the shadows around the eyes were less visible in the Soft Autumn drapes. You have to be careful here. If the face turns yellow, then (my theory is that) the yellow is canceling some of the purple in the shadows, just as we choose yellow concealer.
Look at the whole face. It should not be yellow at all. Even a trace of yellow gives the effect of mild jaundice, the features seem a bit erased. Neither should there be a greyness in the face, where the drape is pulling color out of the skin, but be careful here too. In its milder form, that chalkiness can give the “clearing the skin” impression. The crispest, freshest, healthiest skin was in Soft Summer. That perfect, delicate, aristocratic bone structure definition that Soft Summer does ultimately well was clear.
It was as though I told her she’d been switched at birth. Her identity, her safety net of what it meant to be Anna, was pulled out from under her.
Expect to need time
Start with knowing what to never look at in stores again. That alone will exclude so many distractions that the right items will become more obvious. Look at the item and think about why you should NOT buy it. “The grey is too blue”, “I see yellow in it”, “the white is stark”. Try to talk yourself OUT of it.
Match your Colours Book the best you can. Don’t be distraught if the precise fog brown isn’t obvious. Don’t try to classify every garment you see to its Season. You’re already looking a zillion percent better than you used to. Your eye is learning. The Book does the mixing and matching for you. Remember your principles for how to combine the colours (these are sent to clients after a PCA).
Accept that you will keep making better and better decisions. The effect will get stronger. I get that doing your job is hard enough. This is like asking you to do your job AND learn a new computer system. Don’t worry. You now understand where you came from and you know where you’re going. This is empowerment beyond describing. The branches can’t help but grow when the roots are this strong.
You’ll make a few mistakes. In your first windsurfing class, the guy in the water most is the one trying the hardest, progressing the fastest, working on moving to the edge of the technique. Mistakes are good. Allow them to be good. This is how we learn.
Leave the hair to last
Hair is the hardest to get right, hardest to adjust to quickly, and often the most sensitive (and least objective) self-acceptance feature. Get used to the clothes and makeup first and your brain will be much more compliant when you correct the hair color. Do it in small steps and your mind will say “OK, fine, she’s done this before and I survived”. If you did a big hair adjustment on day 1, your mind would say “Wrong, off, can’t be right, looks weird, change it back, need to go find someone and pester them till they confirm that I looked better before, get me to a phone, I’ll see a different colorist, can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.”
As a child, the hair was a warm toffee blonde. Nevermind. Anna has different skin now and that hair might not work at all. Besides, children’s hair takes more money to replicate than I’m willing to spend on my hair and searching out that rare colorist who could create it.
She is now more the pine cone in the highlight (should she choose to have them), than the wheat field. Her natural base, just visible at the temple below, is not very dark, a medium ash brown. Her eyebrow is light-medium ash brown. Letting the red fade till she can go back to her natural base color, with those watery grey-green eyes, would be like looking into a misty forest.
(See Soft Summer’s Best Hair Color for more on this Season’s most skin-flattering hair color).
Breaking emotional ties
You can’t get rid of your color luggage that fast. Letting go of the past is shaky for all of us. “I always saw myself as…” needs to be uprooted but it’s dug in deep. Doing something different is always destabilizing, even if it’s driving a new way to work. You can’t hold your balance and your position. It’s uncomfortable.
Release who your parents expected. Never look back over your shoulder again. You’re not her anymore. You can choose what she has that you want to keep. Allow the calm, strong feeling of finding, and speaking, in your own true voice.
Learning to repel the marketing all around us is part of the journey. A much more difficult question, that may take a lifetime to answer, is whether we intentionally, but subconsciously, sabotage ourselves. As women, we seem awfully good at undermining our full potential in beauty, as well as in personal strength, more than we could just blame on our marketing culture. Everyone who saw Anna commented on the beauty in her face, and in her person. We women are better at cataloguing our faults. Inadequacies that nobody else sees becomes our security blanket.
If it were given to you at this moment to become everything you could be, how many would take it? Marianne Williamson’s words are repeated so often to let us marvel at the truth of them. It is our not our darkness that we are afraid of. It is our light. (If you don’t know the full passage, read it here).
It is THAT fear that must be entered. PCA is not for everyone. It takes a courage that you didn’t expect would be asked of you. Your view of the world will be challenged. The responsibility to make it as you want it to be will feel forced on you, unless you choose to see it as Opportunity.
Anna will be treated differently as she separates from her past and realizes that she may have to step up to how beautiful the world sees her to be. It will take about a year.
This is what I saw. Go back and look at her eye.
Anna said,
…the whole experience has given me peace. Not initially, obviously, but upon reflection, I feel at peace. It was like meeting myself for the first time. Or finding out something major about myself, that caused me to have to reintroduce myself to myself. (if that makes any sense). And now that the ”fog” has settled, the “muted and dulled fog” : ), I am relaxed at meeting the new me. And I enjoy to know myself that much better. This was another, fairly large piece of the puzzle I found in me. There are less questions. Less self doubt. And I feel like I can forge ahead now, equipped with a better sense of self. I have been enjoying the last few weeks, walking into stores and looking for the “real me” in there somewhere. And when it is not there, I don’t compromise anymore. It’ll be fun. It’ll continue to give me direction, as now I know the destination. There are lots of ways to get there, but I will always arrive at the same place. Within my palette. Whereas before, I had no direction, no sense of self, little confidence, and depended on second opinions a lot. I am getting there. It will take time. But I feel much better already.
Soft Summer’s Best Hair Color
August 15, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 10 Comments
This is really Part 2 of the previous article, Shannon Is A Soft Summer.
For reasons of hair chemistry that I do not understand, this seems to be the hardest hair of all to attain at a salon. This is the Season that most often arrives with the wrong hair color. It is the color that colorists resist creating, in favor of blonde or red or something much too perky on a low-key energy and a very muted, grayish skin.
Soft Summer can balance more darkness than one might think. The hair base colour is usually fairly dark but there is no black in the hair, lashes, or eyes. Shannon has her right hair, or the closest I’ve seen at the PCA appointment. The odd yellow bit is a growing-out highlight, but it’s not really interfering because the rest of the head is so good.
They need some dimension or the woman can feel “plain brown” or mousy, next to her friends. They feel more themselves with another color in the hair. So add a highlight. Be sure that it is never yellow. The yellower the hair, the more the eyes turn grey and dull. Don’t fool with red, it’s the easiest color to regret and the hardest to fix after ink black.
Choose a highlight that is light brown. Too much ash will look flat. Too light will look striped and jarring. Pick a medium to light ash brown with a little warmth, only a couple of shades lighter than the base. Not apricot, not toffee, not butterscotch. They’re all too warm. It should be pine cone brown, maybe a cool caramel at the lightest.
That landscape we saw in the previous post is here again.
Put a daffodil yellow streak through it. Doesn’t feel good. Feels crazy.
Now put a streak this color through it.
Did you feel your guts relax? Said in a prettier way, did you feel a sense of relief? The sense of belonging and being right is palpable.
See the same color around the pupil of the eye? See how the good hair repeats the center of the eye? Is human coloring not the best thing ever? Fills me with wonder, it does.
Hair effects should never be obvious on anybody. There are too many processed-looking heads out there already. This Season should NOT look radiant, or luminous. Soft Summer is NOT sunshine. Don’t listen to ideas about brightening the whole head anymore than you would listen to pops of colour in makeup. Just as people will only see the dark eyeliner, the too-bright lips, they’ll only see the grating hair effects (and ignore every word you speak).
Does everyone in a Season have the same hair, or should they? Of course not. But the skin’s reactions to color are the same within a Season, so their best clothes, makeup, and hair will be the same shades. Common things are common, but there are always exceptions.
Nature creates lots of variations. Adjust your darkness level to be 2 shades lighter than the brows, or both will look fake and hard and angry to children. Shannon’s brow is cooler than the hair, but it works, and we chose an eyeliner to match it since it’s more perfecting to the skin tone. Some Seasons can wear a dark brow with much lighter hair, but Soft Summer is not it. The whole concept here is the opposite of bold or sudden.
This Season is NOT trendy because trend is by definition fleeting. The all-out glamour that everyone woman thinks she seeks, is momentary. You can only be glamour for a few moments. Fleeting belongs to Spring, and glamour to Winter, so only the Bright Seasons can look right in it.
The Soft Seasons are constant and even.
Shannon Is A Soft Summer
August 11, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 23 Comments
Imagine sitting at a kitchen table on a warm summer day, drinking tea, doing some writing. Rainclouds have covered the sun. Shadows seem a bit darker. The door is wide open to let the breeze in. You notice that a few raindrops are coming through the screen. The air is fresher already, your skin feels a bit tighter. Before you get up to close the screen, you look out at the landscape. The rain really starts coming down now. You notice what happened to the colors that were sunlit an hour ago.
The colours are greyed, right? They are still cool, but there is an overlay of grey with a trace of brown, like fog, like watching colour through a raincloud. This Season is Summer’s version of colour in shade. The whole personal colour palette shares this very faint grey-brown common denominator. Light Summer begins with the True Summer palette too, but the colours are seen in pale sunlight.
Every Season has a True note, a higher note, and a lower note. Noise can’t exist without quiet, or light without shade. Soft Summer is Summer’s quieter, lower tempo. In 12 Season Color Analysis, this is the Neutral Season where Summer is beginning to integrate a breath of Autumn.
Drapes
Seldom do I meet such a perfect example of a Season. The skin, the eye colours and patterns, and the hair and brow colour are very much in the middle of the curve for Soft Summer. What made this PCA fun was that Shannon understood the theory and could see the color effects instantly. She was able to do her own analysis, which I love because the doors open fast and easy and the resistance wall crumbles.
Because this coloring is so medium, it seems the most misdiagnosed. The draping was straightforward. A tired face we saw in Winter colours, completely dominated by the drapes. Quite good in Summer colours, but a sense of being incomplete, of not having located the magic. A yellow face in Spring colours, with no benefit that Summer didn’t offer. A slightly yellow face in True Autumn, less so than in Spring colours, with a good eye color intensity, and a sense of “something here is working”.
There was no contest between Soft Summer and either neighbor, placing Shannon in the middle of her Season. Often, Soft Summer has a remarkably fragile bone structure that doesn’t achieve hi-def till it’s in the right colors. The warm neighbor of Soft Autumn color looks queasy, flat, pasty, blunted, and out-of-focus. The cooler True Summer was too blue-shadowed and pink-lidded.
Impression
This is a Summer more than anything. The watery feeling of the colors still applies, as does the coolness and delicacy. Watermelon, clover, and many water colors. Water and hostas can get quite dark, but they’re never crayon.
Soft Season means that not only is the person Soft to look at, with no big jumps between skin/hair/eyes, and so that is how they wear their clothes. Low saturation colours in low contrast combinations. Gentle colour movements. No trends (too exaggerated) or sudden transitions and dark lines (too severe). Related shades work well, but not necessarily monochromatic. Classy. Subtle.
The Colours Book gives you all your swatches, automatically mix-and-matchable. Your analogous, complimentary, and monochromatic colours are all in there. How they are combined depends on the energy of the particular Season. Neutral skin has warmth and coolness, so they have a warmer cosmetic colour palette (Desert Rose type) and a cooler selection (Dusty Plums). Color analyzed makeup colors are in your Book as well.
The Summer personality is seldom overly demanding. Refreshingly pleasant personalities prevail in all 3 Summer Seasons. Children adore their steady and straightforward manner. The loudest voice won’t belong to a Summer. They are highly civilized and have no problem with impulse control.
Autumn inserts practicality, speed, and strength into the Summer core of these people. The moment Autumn is invited to the party, Summer’s soothing way is replaced by Autumn’s determination. The straightness of the brow conveys it in the eye photo alone. As a triathlete, this woman is nothing if not determined.
Soft Summer Hair
This is an article in itself. It is harder to understand and harder to achieve. It’s coming next. Note that the hair is photographing more red than IRL. In the next part, I’ll show you the real color.
Shannon
Your face, Photoshopped, can be yours for the draping. It’s easy to look at and easy to be. After years of feeling uncomfortable with makeup, Shannon said this,
The colors in my swatch feel right to me, as does the description of the Soft Summer personality – it all fits in terms of how I know myself. The make-up application looked and felt fantastic and, for the first time, made me want to buy and wear make-up.
How Light Summer Goes Grey
August 8, 2010 by Christine Scaman · 7 Comments
Effortlessly.
These women were often blond as children. They like being blondes and feel right that way. It seems sometimes as though everyone wants to be blonde, but the question is “Do you want to be blond or do you want to look good?”. As long as it’s the right blonde, and not a toffee color, Light Summers make great and very believable blondes.
In 12 Season Color Analysis, the Light Summer is a Summer more than anything else. Spring plays a small role, so the personal colours palette become lighter, clearer, as though lit by the earliest sun.
The highlight
Their best highlight is beige to light yellow, interlaced in the natural base color. For some, a more yellow highlight works better than others. Staying closer to beige than yellow is better. On all Summers, too yellow hair flushes the skin tone red.
Louise, in Louise and Stevan Are Light Springs, has this same base color. She could look odd in an overall head as light and yellow as some Light Summers. On the other hand, a highlight that’s too ash would be draining because of the amount of yellow in Light Spring skin. The variations among individuals are endless. This game is all and only about how the skin drapes. That’s the key that gives you answers that might surprise you.
L to R, Light Summer, True Summer, True Winter
The test drapes for Light Summer show the best highlight color for this Season. I put True Winter’s stark white on the right side, just for comparison. This Season looks fantastic in their pale vanilla white.
The base hair color
The natural base is usually a medium ash brown, not golden blonde (which implies red and warm). On everyone, the more of the base that shows through, the less harsh and processed the whole head looks, and the more real and effortless the woman appears. Dealing with roots takes a fraction of the time and money, especially if the colorist didn’t start the highlights right at the part in the top layer. For many women, highlights can often get bigger and bigger till the head is one big highlight. They’re supposed to be woven in like fibers of light, but it gets away from us.
This is my favorite Light Summer hair, before she got over-blonded and over-yellowed.
Going grey
The skin cools with age and it’s expected that the hair cools. Grey feels inherently cool so it’s more difficult to make this transition for the pure warm Seasons of True Spring and True Autumn. It’s easier for the other 10 Seasons, once your mind is in a place where you can accept yourself with gray hair. The pure cool Seasons are already there. Dyed hair may be competing more with the skin than grey would.
The Neutral Seasons have warmth and coolness in the skin. They can wear silver jewelry. They might choose more grey clothes and makeup as hair grays. Gray hair virtually disappears into this head. It just looks like more blonde. They can be in their 60s with still a lot of color left in the hair, because “gray hair” is just white. Light Summer just asks for less and less highlight, and eventually just goes to the salon for a cut.
This is my sister Sonja’s hair, from Sonja Is A Light Summer. She’s 47, with some gray in there. She’ll probably look much like this when she’s 57.
There is nothing that can make it better. It’s fresh, light, and real. There is no tension in the viewer of feeling like they have to react to an exaggerated effect. Where highlights are concerned, no good comes of being an overachiever.
Remember that ANY Season can have ANY hair color. I’ve seen Light Summers with very cool, medium dark, red hair. Almost more of a pinkish brown. Leave that gift alone.
Edit August 11: I was asked to show Sonja’s part. Here it is:
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